Not the Only Race in Town

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Saturday, 2:30  p.m.

Harris and I take a car service to the Point, a patch of Colonial houses in varying degrees of renovation and upkeep, some with secret gardens, on narrow streets, some named after trees. We disembark on Washington Street, along the harbor, before a dull gray Victorian.

The house is so crowded I have to work to see the marble fireplaces and wide-plank pine floors until there’s a rush to the decks overlooking the harbor. The America’s Cup fleet races are starting.

I examine a carved-wood staircase. “You see yesterday’s capsize?”

Recognizing Stumpy’s voice feels good, a baby step toward belonging.

“I didn’t get up here til evening.”

Stumpy shakes his head, almost in disgust, but quickly turns animated. “What a sight. I’m a single hull guy, but those cats.” He whistles, extols the beauty and speed of the catamarans with such enthusiasm that I’m getting excited myself about a sport I know nothing about. I’m vulnerable to catching other people’s moods.

“Sweetie and I made a bet. I like an underdog but I had to go with Oracle.”

“What’s the prize?”

He grins. “Can’t say in polite company.”

“Thanks for that much.” I don’t see Harris, and slip away from Stumpy trying not to imagine he and Sweetie having any kind of sex, so of course the pictures get more and more vivid until a large Navajo rug hanging on a wall catches my attention. I slip around the edges of high-ceilinged rooms with the sort of eclectic mix of antiques– a gas lamp, a Regency table with lion-paw feet, Japanese turn-of-the-century prints—that’s inherited not collected. I climb the stairs, accompanied by a couple heading to the roof deck. The man’s eyes roam my body and I pretend I feel better about it by remembering Mae West’s line that she’d rather be looked over than overlooked. The guy’s date manages the latter part.

They rise up another flight and I duck down a hallway lined with guest bedrooms that are among the first I’ve seen in town that don’t have a nautical theme. No feminine touches, either.

“There’s no point!”

I halt a few steps before a half-closed door. I’ve never heard Harris sound angry.

“Don’t be such a prude. It was years ago, now…”

“Two!” Harris replies to a woman’s voice.

“Whatever. She’s had plenty of guys since. And I’m so tired of hearing poor Meade, her family hates her, she lost her fiancé. She treated him like crap, and he wasn’t going to marry her in the end.”

“Just settle the estate and get on with your life.”

 “This is my hometown, too. And she doesn’t deserve any more of Mummum’s money than I do.”

Jinx—I might have known it from the clippity-clip of her voice, a gallop just like her sister’s.

“Clarissa made the decision. I don’t think you can blame Meade.”

 “I thought you, at least, wouldn’t take sides,” she says.

“I’m not. I’m asking you not to make a bad situation worse by telling her you were sleeping with him.”

Jinx’s silence is brief. “Don’t worry about it. She’s quite good at avoiding me.”

I slink back down the stairs and out to the bumper-to-bumper deck. My back pressed flat against the house, I listen to cheers and grunts and try to decipher the language of sailing. I can see only the spectators’ boats clogging the harbor, so I gaze in the opposite direction at the Pell Bridge. When I’d tried to guess what Jinx had done to earn the opprobrium of this crowd, I knew it had to be more than the standard-issue dalliance with hard drugs or rapid-fire trust fund depletion. This was the town of Doris Duke and Claus von Bulow, after all. I’d assumed Jinx had fallen prey to a colorful new  version of rich-kid self-destruction. I hadn’t considered that the person she had hurt was her sister.

“One of the longest suspension bridges in the country.”

The new voice startles me, and I’m glad. Had I seen its owner approach I would have also been tongue-tied, but now I had an excuse.

“Sorry to sneak up, but I believe a host should spend time with each of his guests.”

“I know.”

His left eyebrow twitches. He is taller than I am and I instantly calculate that I can wear a two-inch heel and keep it that way.

 “I mean, about the bridge. I’m an architect.”

“Wonderful.” He smiles. “So when was this house built?”

“1880s or 90s?”

“It’s not really a fair question, forgive me. But it was actually built in 1789, and got its first update a hundred years later. A Victorian face-lift. A few traces of the original are about if you look carefully.” Dark-eyed and dimpled, his face chameleoned from swarthy to elegant. The slight asymmetry of his face—the tip of his nose slightly tilted left and his mouth a bit crooked, though it righted itself when he smiled— kept him from being too pretty.

 “I’ve always been a fan of scavenger hunts.”

“Good.”

The deck erupts as one of the racing boats bangs into a mark boat. The host whose name I don’t know dashes to the railing.

I slip into the house and start my hunt at the bar. The bartender watching the race on his phone looks annoyed when I ask for a glass of pinot grigio. I reach for the bottle.

“I’ll pour it myself, no problem.”

Before I came to Newport I hadn’t had a drink in the afternoon since college. Now I did almost every weekend, and each time I reasoned that it was a special occasion. The sun-gorgeous days were so relaxing, so uplifting in their newness, that champagne always seemed appropriate.  I’m cleaning up my act by switching to wine.

 In the kitchen, the English tile fireplace suddenly looks phony. I scoot down to see the interior.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Playing a game.”

“Alone?” Harris doesn’t wait for an explanation. He introduces me to Jinx, who immediately starts talking to the man who came in with them without so much as a glance at me. I take it as confirmation Harris told her a lot about me.

“It ghastly hot in here. Shall we? We’ve got a party at the Clambake,” Jinx leans toward Harris but instead of kissing his cheek she grabs both his hands. “Be cool, okay.”

Her escort waves goodbye like Queen Elizabeth.

It’s time to move on, Harris says, to Harbour Court. I place my glass in the deep porcelain sink and follow Harris outside.

 “Shouldn’t we thank our host?”

“Rit? Nah. We’ll see him later, or tomorrow. We’ll watch from the Mayfair.”

I know enough not to ask any more about him.

 “How long is Meade’s sister in town?”

“Couple of days.”

“She’s not as pretty as Meade.” I want to be loyal, to defend Meade. Harris doesn’t answer.

Our car arrives and we climb in back. A bottle of Hiedsieck waits in an ice bucket. I glance through the window at Rit’s house.

“What’s that?” Harris pops the cork.

“It’s dark gray with navy shutters. Colonial colors. Victorians generally used earthy colors, or pastels.”

Joining the Sky Club

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Friday, 10 p.m.

         I’ve never been a club girl, but I suppose I’d go dancing in the city a lot more if I always could do what Meade and I just did: walk to the front of the line outside the Candy Store and smile as a bouncer waves us inside, no humiliation or attempts at sexy dressing required.

        One flight down is the Boom Boom Room, the dance club where the line-dwellers want to shake their booties. We hike up a few flights to the SkyBar. Stumpy and his wife,  Sweetie, make patient conversation with the dark-haired guy who’s the only one of their dinner party guests still seated.

       A couple of men push aside tables to open up a dance floor. Someone cranks up the music. Cissy shimmies toward us in another low-cut green dress. She takes the adage that a redhead should wear green a bit too seriously.

       Arms in the air, shoulders gyrating, Harris is a whirligig speeding toward us. I suspect he isn’t a good lover. He calls to the bartender for champagne.

      “Maybe tonight I want a cocktail.”

      “Nah. I like predictable.”

      Cissy’s smile has nothing to do with sweetness. “I can see why you stick with that dress, it does make you look as if you have curves.”

      A double-barreled insult; I almost admire it.

        “Who’s the guy talking to Sweetie?” Meade asks.

       “Michael something,” Cissy does the hair-flip. “I think he’s looking for a place in town. Nice, huh?”

       “That Stentman?”

      Meade gulps her martini and hands it to Harris. “Let me find out for you.”

      Cissy follows her; she always seems to be a few steps behind Meade. For all her coiled resentment she seems comfortable existing in her best friend’s refracted light.

     Harris and I catch up: I’d landed a new client and he’d won all four court tennis matches he’d played during the week. From the corner of my eye I spot Meade dancing with Sweetie’s friend. Cissy’s disappeared.

     For the first time it hits me: Cissy doesn’t like me hanging around with Meade—that I understood. It is how girls work. But she treats Harris like her possession, too.

      “Did you and Cissy ever go out?”

       Harris shrugs.

     “So cryptic.”

     “Come on, dance.”

      I protest that I needed to relax after battling Friday night traffic on interstate 95.

       “For a while my mother lived with a woman,” Harris says. “I was only ten, so I didn’t get it.”  This isn’t the place for an intimate discussion so it’s the perfect place for him to open up.

           “But she went back to your father?”

            “The week I left for Exeter.”

            “That’s tough.” I lay my hand on his. Until I do I hadn’t thought of it as a reward, the tit-for-tat of intimacy.

            Bluesy slides between Harris and me. All week I’d been angry with myself for my stunned silence after she insulted me. It’s tricky, because I don’t want to make things awkward with Harris by being cool to his friends. I’m not skilled in subtle social warfare, but I’ve begun learning its tactics from the people who are becoming my adversaries.

            “I haven’t even met him.” Harris says to Bluesy.

            “He isn’t appropriate.”

            “Meade seems to like him.”

             Bluesy rolls her pale blue eyes. I can’t hear her whispered reply. I ease closer, but “Play That Funky Music White Boy” swallows their conversation.

         Restless, I lean back with my elbows on the bar and watch people dance. An elderly couple moves so comfortably together it makes me wistful. I hold on to the hope that a long, happy marriage only seems a lost art until you meet the right person.

     Meade throws back her head, laughing, as Michael spins her, a move surprisingly graceful for a guy with a Power Ranger body crammed into a bespoke suit.

      I slip around the dancers to find the bathroom. Both stalls are occupied so I gather the curlicues of hair sticking to my neck and tuck them into my ponytail. I hear a man’s voice and freeze. Cissy zigzags out a door like a drunken arrow. The guy who stumbles behind her is a decade younger. He grins at me as he zips his fly.

For the Love of Money

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Saturday, 7 p.m.

       I wait for Harris at the foot of Rosecliff’s heart-shaped, red-carpeted stairway.“You’d have to have a grand romance to live here. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton kind of thing.

          “Not my style.”

            “Mine, either. You think we’re missing something?”

            Harris slides his arm through mine and we enter a ballroom spinning with couples, motion the gasoline of a party getting started. Relief softens my stance. My blue knee-length dress wasn’t the disaster I’d feared. A third of the women wore cocktail dresses.

I admire the grand chandeliers and the intricately plastered ceiling, the building a frothy confection, vanilla buttercream frosting with pink flowers.

“Romantic,” I say. “The house, I mean. Though if Versailles had never been built I don’t know where Newport architects would have gotten their inspiration.”

“Ancient Rome.” Harris says.

I want to know more about his house, which Meade described as exquisite, but it might seem too personal. So I ask about his family.

            “Mother, father, sister.”

            “Dog, cat, goldfish?”

            He smiles, but doesn’t bite.

 “Do they live in town?”

            “My parents visit two weeks a year, one in May and one in September. Palm Beach.”

            We step onto a patio centerpieced by an impotent fountain. Party-goers spread across the deep lawn, beyond which the ocean is a concrete plane on this windless evening. At once the beauty is real and artificial. Or is it that beauty is so because it doesn’t last.

 “Everyone says we’re in another Gilded Age,” I say. “Which means we’re headed for trouble.”

            “Not worried about it.”

            “Maybe you should be, for the rest of us.”

            “I’m a conservative guy. I’ve seen too many wipeouts. Even this party has its share of ruined aristocrats.”

            I remind him we’re not in England. “Do you think Meade will be okay?”

             “Never worry about that girl. She’s tough as nails.”

            “Who’s that?” Stumpy and his wife came up behind us.

            “Meade couldn’t make it,” I say.

            Stumpy nods. “Damn shame.”

He might have been talking about her absence or her legal battle, but his wife leaves no room for misinterpretation. “The shame is that the Duntons turn everything into high drama. Meade and Jinx are the same as their parents before them. Clarrisa was the only sane one, and I’m sure Jinx’s last stunt took years off her life.”

            “Ah, they’re sweet girls,” Harris mutters.

Stumpy’s wife lifts her chin a bit to signal her disagreement. She chides Harris for not responding to an invitation she’d sent him.

            “I’m sure I did.”

            “After I spent months planning….”

            “It’s her first big one, London,” Stumpy says. “You need to get a table.”

            “What’s this one for? The Thai gardening society, the lepers of Norway? How many more parties can we squeeze into one summer? What do you figure, Stumps?”

            Even the nicknames have nicknames.

            “I’m going to add it up. If I get the top ticket for every event I’m invited to, it’s going to run forty, fifty grand a summer.”

            “What’s this,” Stumpy bellows. “London’s worried about money?”

            Harris’ cheeks flush.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” I say. “But I could use a glass of water.”

“To the bar we go,” Harris says, though waiters buzz through the crowd. His hand on the small of my back. I like that I did him a favor.  I’d reached the age where I understood that a woman gets passion or comfort, never both, and though I wasn’t happy about giving up heat it no longer felt like a terrible trade.

            “What did Jinx do that was so upsetting?” Meade always says she was the good child.

            Harris shakes his head. I gather it’s not nothing, but nothing he is going to tell me.

Our path is an obstacle course of people Harris wants to chat with, so I leave him to his social duties and find the ladies room. Long ago I decided I wouldn’t bother much with make-up, not seeing the point of trying to convince people I was more beautiful than I actually am. But something about wearing an expensive new dress made me want to bust out the lipstick I’ve carried unopened in my purse since I bought it on the way to a New Year’s party.

             I examine the shade in the mirror, unsure if it is too dark a red.The door swings open. “Bluesy! I’m so glad to see you. I stopped at your house this morning but you weren’t in. The place is gorgeous.”

She nods. I ask her what we need to discuss. My speech has begun to mimic theirs, vague and bright.

            “If something doesn’t work, let the groundskeeper know. He’s there Tuesday to Thursday.”

Her eyes in the mirror catch mine. “A summer fling is one thing,” she says. “But don’t be a fool. He’ll never marry you.”

Our Private Newport

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Saturday, 2. p.m.

A rack of bikinis on the sidewalk outside a clothing store. Model ships in an art gallery window. A beach town’s tried-and-true, I tell Meade over salads at the Spiced Pear.

“There are several Newports. Ours is one those people never see.”

“Your private Newport.” I say, naming the old phone directory I spotted on a bookcase in the greenhouse.

She squeezes more lemon into her iced tea.

“I don’t want Harris paying my rent.” Another friend I would have told outright that I didn’t know how to bring up the topic with Harris without offending him or, worse, making a fool of myself if he wasn’t intending to pay. From what I’d seen Meade and her peers consider asking for advice giving up power.

“He’s a generous guy, that’s his thing. Every guy leads with a thing. Looks, brains, money. They pick their strongest point and make sure you know it like, in five minutes.”

Was she not getting it, or me?

“I like him, but I’m not sure he’s my type.”

“If he was hot I’d have snapped him up a long time ago.”

It might not be rational, but I feel a bit insulted. And I have another concern: I wasn’t devoid of self-esteem but it had crossed my mind that a man as smart and wealthy as Harris shouldn’t have much trouble finding a girlfriend.

Meade pushes away the remains of her walnut-and-mesclun lunch. “This is a small world. I could use some new blood myself for some fun.”

“You could leave Newport.” I think it a particularly appealing choice for a woman whose family has turned on her, but I’m wrong.

“Never.”

I pick up the check, as I had done the few times we had coffee or lunch to thank her for putting me up my first weekend in town. Meade didn’t carry a wallet in any case.

Jim the bartender is waiting for us at the bottom of one the steep side streets off Thames. He bear-hugs Meade. “Great news. The other prospect doesn’t want it.”

“So it’s mine? At the amount we offered?”

“If you start paying the fifteenth.. Otherwise he wants three hundred more a month.”

Meade grimaces and starts up the hill. I notice Jim notice how good she looks from behind in her white denim shorts. Saying he’d talk to the owner again, he yanks open a heavy door to the gutted interior of a brick building that had been stables. Jim knocks on pipes and walls. Slowly Meade transforms from overwhelmed to excited. Her long arms draw in the air: a wall of windows, a front desk there—she had just the piece, the Goddard and Townsend desk that was one of the few things she’d removed from the main house during her grandmother’s final days.

“You’ll get by with fifty grand, if I do most of the work,” Jim says.

We close up the place and walk back to Bannister’s Wharf, diesel from boat engines mixing with the scent of fried fish. Jim ducks into the Candy Store to start his shift.

“His adoration is sort of hard to watch.”

“He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t enjoy it,” Meade says. “He knows I would never date him, much less marry him.”

“Because he’s a bartender?”

“And his parents are schoolteachers.”

Meade’s father had died when she was eighteen, and when I’d told her mine had passed away when I was fourteen, her green eyes had shined. A response devoid of the sympathy people typically offer, but I understood. She’d found a comrade. We had never spoken about what our fathers had done for a living. Rather, she had told me how hers had lived, with grand gestures, French mistresses and no regrets. One of the mistresses had taught her to choose perfume with notes of musk. Another offered the advice that a man should never see his lover entirely naked or she loses her mystery.

I unlock my bike and judder it off the rack. “I would think that a woman who doesn’t have to worry about money would be free to marry for love.”

“Well right now I don’t have any.” Meade rattles off the names of a few women I didn’t know, and Bluesy’s. “They all married poor guys and every time I see them I think those guys saw dollar signs. I mean, the guys they married are so much better-looking than they are.”

I’m not proud that I’d noticed that myself. To these men, a moneyed plain Jane was just another kind of trophy.

“Plot didn’t have money?”

“He worked in a bookstore in Cambridge.”

The conversation depresses me, so I ask Meade what time she’s going to the ball.

“So not going. I have my own charities, ones my family has been with for years.” Meade downs half the water in the porcelain bottle she carries everywhere. Her eyes cloud. “ You don’t know what it’s like, to have everyone expect so much from you. You look like I do and you come from my family and if you marry a guy who isn’t, you know, your equal then you’ve totally failed. I’ve fucked up enough already.”

The Rings of the Redwood

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Saturday, 10 am.

I’m enchanted with the thick stone walls and wide-plank pine floors of my carriage house. The leaded windows are small but plentiful in the front room. Late last night I climbed into a bed tucked beneath a low ceiling. I stretched my arms to each side and my fingertips touched the plaster walls; expecting to feel cramped I felt cocooned.

The shower’s cold water doesn’t turn warm, but I wasn’t going to complain. I feel lucky. I get dressed and walk a few hundred feet to the main house. No one answers. I haven’t yet spoken to my new landlords. Harris arranged everything, emailing that when I arrived Friday the door would be open and a key left on the table. The cleaning lady would come every Thursday morning.

My week had been a blur. A new client and tight deadline, and I cut out of work twice in the middle of the day to comb Bergdorf Goodman and the boutiques on Madison Avenue for a dress to wear to the charity party. My closet was a shrine to black. The only long dress I owned was a long-sleeved Gucci from Tom Ford’s heyday that I’d been wildly excited to discover in an Upper East Side consignment store. I didn’t have to be sure what was right for summer in Newport to know I didn’t have it.

I unloaded my bike from the trunk of my rented Honda. Cycling against the wind, my hair twisted behind me in Medusa-like funnels. White waves rose like antsy horses in the choppy ocean.

Traffic’s a nightmare downtown. I stop on Bellevue in front of a classically inspired building, the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. My new crush has Doric columns and a collection of stately trees on its grounds.

I’m not interested in reading, which is good because a sign tells me only members can borrow. Hanging high in the main room are portraits by Gilbert Stuart and his like, men who wanted to become painters that mattered while painting the faces of contemporaries who mattered.

I searched the stern face of one of Harris’ ancestors but find no resemblance.

The lives of my immigrant grandparents remain mysteries to me. My mother liked to quote them: we’re in America now so we will be Americans. A definition that required amnesia or at least burial of the past. My mother had been forty when she had me, and she’d been born to an older mother as well, one who’d come with her husband to the New York of a far different era.

I let the dead bury the dead. The less I was defined the more free I was to become something true. I would rise and fall on my own talents and determination. But staring at Augustus Moore London I considered the person I might have become beneath the scrutiny of my ancestors’ eyes and their fortunes marble beneath my feet.

He Needs, She Needs

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Saturday, 1:37 p.m.

I rush across the sloping lawn behind Harbour Court imagining dropped-waist linen dresses and straw boaters at a summer wedding. I would have been happy spending the afternoon in its paneled library but everyone else was on board.

I pop one of the ginger candies a Google search promised would settle my stomach. As a rule I avoid boats. The Staten Island ferry makes me nauseous. But I’d come to Newport not because I couldn’t find another way to spend the weekend, or believed Meade and I would be best friends forever, but because the life I’d created in Manhattan, by design or by chance, had started to feel too tight. I needed change: A pivot on which my life would turn into something more inspiring. I’d been fighting the virus of discontent with plenty of medicine, but the promotion I’d finally snagged and the personal best in a half-marathon and the commitment to attending one only-in-New-York event a week only briefly cooled the fever. A new boyfriend would help, but easy fixes usually don’t hold for long. Besides, finding that guy was far from simple. Six months had passed since I woke up knowing that as good as Tom and I had it, it was never going to get any better, and I couldn’t say why but it was not enough.

The other reason was Roderick. I have an address in my pocket.

I step into the cabin. My eyes adjust to the dimness as I pass leather club chairs and a painting of a shipwreck that was such a bad omen it had to be a joke. Maybe Harris, like Wall Street tycoons, confused living an abundantly cushioned life with risk-taking.

“Here she is!” In loose khaki shorts and an ancient Izod Harris looks a junior at Exeter, his alma mater.

After hello, I ask how big it has to be before it’s considered a yacht.

“The boat or the ego?” Harris’s shoulders bogey.

A woman with a face like a hatchet stares at my feet as her husband and Harris discuss the Bermuda Race that both are skipping this year. I consider all that might be wrong with my flat sandals until I notice everyone is barefoot. A waitress hands me a glass of champagne. Slipping off my sandals, I excuse myself and join Meade and Cissy, who sprawl on the built-in seats bordering the deck, their languid poses so artfully arranged they appear natural.

Meade runs down the names and connections among the dozen or so guests, a matrix of marriages and school ties.

“It’s nice,” I say, “that no one has asked me what I do for a living. In New York it’s usually the first question, or the second, after someone asks where you live.”

Meade laughs. “Ask anyone in Newport what they do and if they don’t they’ll be insulted you think they have to work, and if they do work they’ll be even more insulted that you think they have to.”

“That’s not true. Plot is a rare book dealer. And Harris is a lawyer,” Cissy says.

“Harris went to law school. So does everybody.”

“Plot?”

“You were just…”

Meade interrupts her friend. “Martin Vanderblue. Married to Bluesy.”

Plot, Bluesy, Topsy—what it is about having trust funds that leads people to adopt silly nicknames? I’d known a few frat boys in college who’d named their penises things like Rocket and Excalibur, but these names seem designed to turn women into little girls and men into cartoons.

My lungs are insatiable, breathing greedy the briny air. The day’s perfection and since I’ve been thinking about omens I took it as one intended for me. Whenever I go through a rough spot in life I wildly search for signs from the universe. I may have thrown off the churchgoing and the dogma of my Catholic upbringing but I remain vulnerable to superstition.

Harris yells from the top deck for everyone to join him. U2 blares from hidden speakers. Cissy’s first up the stairs.

“You have two feet, you dance.” The man Meade had identified as Stumpy, a Harvard buddy of Harris and twice divorced, grabs my elbow at the top of the stairs. He’s six foot two or three, but I don’t ask where he got the name.

The shoreline’s devolved into a gray stripe. Harris breaks in, and a couple of songs later drifts away from me to dance with Bluesy Vanderblue. I walk, far from steadily, to the bow and lift my face like a tribal offering to the sun, remembering being eight or nine and snug in the back seat of our Volvo station wagon for the drive from our Pennsylvania town to Cape Cod for a two-week vacation. A scarf tied around my mother’s thick brown hair. The back of my father’s neck already reddened from a springtime of golf outings. I had the full fat feeling that I would never be so free again.

The Mayfair nears its mooring, and I join the others gathering on the aft deck. Harris announces he would drive me home after we had dinner at the club. “We’ll watch the sunset on the patio.”

Meade didn’t say anything about joining us.

“Thanks, but I was raised to go home with the person who brought me.”  I try to sound like they do, bright and vague.

“Well, the sun sets every evening,” Harris says.

Cissy tells him I’m leaving in the morning.

Harris’s long eyelashes seemed to scrape the back of his lenses as he blinks. “You don’t have a place for the summer? Bluesy, Plot? Your carriage house is empty, right?”

Bluesy doesn’t hide every trace of annoyance on her face.  “It is empty.”

Harris beams. “Done.”

Half-buzzed and thoroughly tired, we disembark and head back to Meade’s car. From the backseat I say how nice it was of Harris to ask the Vanderblues about the carriage house.

“Harris gets what Harris wants,” Meade say.

Did he want me? I’m afraid to ask. “He doesn’t seem overly aggressive, obnoxious or anything.”

“He’s descended from the five families.” Cissy clearly enjoys reminding me of my outsider status. “And still one of the wealthiest in town…Bluesy’s family may be more so…”

“Not after the house in St. John and the divorce.” Meade has a sixth sense that picks up the amount of money flowing in and out of a family’s coffers. “Harris is on the admissions committee at Bailey’s Beach Club. Bluesy, too.”

“Your mother can’t take away your right to the cabana, can she?”

Meade groans.  “I’ll kill her. It’s not like my mother was ever a decent mother, but Jinx, I just….”

“She’s jealous, that’s all.”

’m an only child, and the nature of sibling bonds evades me, but I can tell Meade isn’t buying Cissy’s explanation for why the sister has sided with her mother. “What does Jinx tell you is the reason?”

“She hasn’t returned my calls. In, like, two years.”

Meade stops in front of a deep blue Queen Anne-style house. Cissy climbs out without saying anything to me.

Meade checks her texts. “Harris is asking me your phone number. Okay?”

“What do you think?”

“Why not?” She’s already texting.

“He wants to know if you’ll go the Land Trust’s ball next Saturday.”

I’m not impressed with guys that ask me out via text, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about him, but Harris had done me a big favor. I needed place to stay and he had needed a date. I listen to Meade trace the history of arguments she’s had with her sister. And I wonder if every relationship is nothing more than an exchange of needs.

Do I Look Rich in these Pants?

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Saturday, 10:15 a.m.

Meade’s grandmother had an antique greenhouse shipped in pieces from an English estate and reconstructed behind the Richard Morris Hunt house Meade might one day inherit. Not one of his better buildings but I would love to see from the inside. Meade says her key no longer works. The locks have been changed.

 I brush my teeth in an industrial sink, throw on a sweatshirt and step outside. Meade squeezes more lemon into the hot water she drinks every morning.

 “What do you think? I know you will be honest.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m a good judge of people.”

I look again at the canvas propped on the easel in front of her. She adds more brown paint to a swirl that might be an insurance company logo.

 “A river runs through it,” I say.

 “I’m so glad you get that. Earth and water. All the clothing in my line will be shades of blue and brown.”

“Cool. Did you eat?”

“The first samples will be here this week. I want you to try them on.”

I’m too concerned about breakfast to remind her I would be leaving tomorrow. I ask if there’s any place I can walk to get a muffin or bagel and coffee. She doesn’t drink caffeine or eat bread, my morning staples.

 “We’ll stop on the way. I’ve got to do laundry.”

The heiress doesn’t have a washing machine. She loads yoga pants and lace thongs into a battered Vuitton suitcase while a few feet away I stand beneath a shower head rigged to one of the screeching copper pipes running across the ceiling. I feel exceptionally naked, the unavoidable light headlining every flaw of my body, but Meade doesn’t look up from her task. Other beautiful women I’ve known have been a collection of moods, quicksilver switches from haughty to self-hating, though it took me years to understand the latter is more often real than a show put on to make the less pretty feel more comfortable. No different, I suppose, than artists who loathe their own work. We are most critical of the things we believe, often mistakenly, that make us special.

At a boulangerie I order two croissants, chocolate and almond, and two lattes. Meade drinks the decaf and I eat both croissants on the half-hour drive to a laundromat where Meade is sure she won’t run into anyone she knows on the street.

At the Candy Store

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Saturday, 9:18 p.m.

There’s an open table at Clarke Cooke House, which they call the Candy Store in homage to a previous incarnation, but later we’ll have dinner two flights up in the SkyBar. It’s tourists and the post-college crowd down here, but Jim’s behind the bar. Cissy slides onto the only available stool.

“And now there are three.’ Jim shakes a bleached swag of hair off a sun-damaged forehead.

Meade orders a bottle of champagne. “You talk to that landlord?”

“In the works, angel.” Jim winks at me. “I’ve done everything she’s asked since grammar school but she still won’t go out with me.”

Meade grins. “Why ruin a beautiful arrangement?”

Cissy crosses her legs slowly enough to get the attention of a clump of frat-boy types, though we already had it. “It’s about time you got out of that greenhouse.”

“I’m not about to leave the property,” Meade says. “I want to open a yoga studio.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’d have to get up early and teach classes.”

“I can hire someone. Some kid who will work free for experience.” Meade says. “I want the judge to see I’m not desperate for money. Once anyone thinks you need something, they’ll never give it to you.”

A Guy and The Grande Dame

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6:40 p.m.

A valet parks the car on the vast lawn of a house set back from Bellevue Avenue. Across the street tourists with thick white calves climb into a double-decker bus in front of a Gilded Age mansion; The Elms or maybe The Breakers. I’d like to walk around those weird wonders myself while I’m here. Sometimes I think I became an architect less because I like to build things than because of the calm I feel wandering through places and imagining other lives, lives I can’t envision until I see another woman’s bed linens or choice of paint colors.

We enter a stone-and-cedar ramble of a house. A woman in a peach Chanel jacket greets us with the request to add our names to a list of potential Republican party donors.

“I’m independent.” It isn’t the same as being an Independent but I’ve been working on becoming more diplomatic without lying.

“Topsy’s big in the party.” Meade lifts two glasses of champagne from a tray set on a console.  Along a narrow hallway, black-and-white photos hang in even intervals above wainscoting. Every room I peek into looks like a vintage photo of an antique shop. Meade slips through an archway toward the light music of voices. I tell her I’ll be right there and enter a dining room with a mahogany table large enough to seat eighteen. I pile a china plate with salmon and roast beef and chunks of lobster. I must be smiling because a voice beside me asks what I find amusing.

“I haven’t seen Ritz crackers in years.”

“Than you haven’t spent much time in Newport. And I know that’s true because I would have noticed you.” Harris London is an inch or so shorter than my five foot ten and wears rimless glasses that do nothing to add interest to his moonface.

“I’m a friend of Meade Dunton’s.”

“I’ll talk to her about where she’s been hiding you.” Harris’ sentences end with a little laugh. I figure he’s an optimist, a vastly underrated quality in a man, so instantly I like him.

He spews recommendations: restaurants and beaches. Do I play tennis? Sail? He’s had his eye on a bottle in Topsy’s cellar. Champagne’s good enough, I protest, but he’s already off. I notice he pays strict allegiance to what a glance around the room reveals is the Newport man’s uniform: navy jacket, white shirt, yellow or blue tie, khakis and loafers.

I clean my plate and before the elderly man smiling at me approaches, I wind my way to the living room. The glow of the peach-pink sunset through leaded windows seems to land foremost on Meade. She’s in the midst of a clump of people who nod at me as she describes me as a great find.

“That’s Meade,” Cissy shakes her auburn hair, her best feature, in my opinion. I’m guessing she thinks it’s the D-cups on display in her low-cut halter dress. “Always bringing home strays.”

Harris returns, scolding me for running away. Meade’s heavy eyebrows, a la Brooke Shields, rise slightly as he slips a glass of wine into my left hand.

“To another perfect Newport summer.” Harris wants to know if I like the wine I’ve hardly had a chance to sip.

“Delicious.”

He nods toward a passing waitress who whisks away the champagne glass in my right hand.

Meade steps forward to greet our elderly hostess. Compliments fly behind air-kisses. How healthy she looks; how her Fortuny dress would sell for plenty on eBay.

Topsy lays a crinkled hand on Meade’s forearm. “I’ve never let the mistakes of others interfere with my happiness.”

Meade beams as if Topsy’s self-praise is a compliment to her, one she’s worked a lifetime to earn. She remembers to introduce us.

“Pleased to meet you,” I say.

Topsy’s skin is crosshatched with lines, but her pale blue-eyed gaze is steady. “I can’t understand why people say that when meeting strangers. I might be a pedophile.”